Today’s Reading: John 11:1-54

“Jesus wept.” The shortest verse in the English Bible (second shortest in the Greek), is jam-packed with emotion. Are you surprised by this wave of intense feeling from Jesus? Sometimes we can get this idea in our heads that Jesus was very stoic (showing only the same unmoved emotion—like the Queen), and therefore we, as His disciples, need to face life’s hardships without any real emotional response to things.

What a bunch of hogwash, eh? If Jesus could weep, why can’t we? In His humanity, He felt a wide range of emotions and responded accordingly (although He never sinned)!

Knowing that Jesus was truly human, experiencing the same emotions in the face of similar circumstances as us, should encourage us to pray more confidently in the hard times. It should also strengthen us to know that we serve a God who truly understands what it’s like to be one of us.